I do a lot of browsing on my htpc hooked up to my big screen. I switch between Chrome and Firefox because both have their strengths and weaknesses. However, over the past year Chrome has really gotten out of hand when it comes to memory usage, while Firefox has improved immensely. Firefox used to be known for its memory leaks but now it seems Chrome is the one with the issues.

I took a snapshot of the about:memory usage in Chrome, and right now they are using about the same amount of memory. However, I have 10 tabs open in Chrome and 85 open in Firefox! If I were to try to open that many tabs in Chrome it typically uses 3+ gigs of ram and up to 6 gigs of cache. Since I have 4GB of ram on my system, this effectively maxes out both my physical and virtual memory, and Chrome lags immensely, taking forever to load new tabs or refresh current ones. It also has a huge problem with pages that auto refresh. It doesn't release memory properly. By the end of the day Facebook and iGoogle will balloon to 800+MB EACH. That is just ridiculous.

I find Chrome to be much faster and less crash prone than Firefox. I was loyal FF user until about 2 months ago when I finally made the transition and I haven't looked back. However, I typically have only about 10 tabs open. What do you need 85 tabs open for??

I've noticed Chrome being slower in general the last year. I thought it was b/c of my add-ins so I disabled a bunch of them w/o much improvement. FF is still slower w/ similar add-ins. I can't open more than 10 tabs w/o going crazy.

Of course it is going to eat up resources, with both browsers up and running, and 10 on one and 85 on another. If just with one tab open on either and let to run, and they start eating up memory, you need to let either company know, by submitting a ticket.

At any given time I have 10-15 tabs open, sometimes more. I am a huge multi-tasker, even more when I'm at work with 3 screens running and chrome is a huge hog it seems lately.

Switched to firefox at work, may do the same at home, supper laggy tonight with only 8-10 tabs open.

I'll open a window find 3 things I want to google more, (4 tabs), in those windows it can lead to 3 more things (7 tabs) remember a movie I wanted to watch (8 tabs), wait which movie did she play in and which does she have coming out (9 tabs), oh i need to buy those posters (10 tabs), what's going on in the news (11 tabs), where's the music (12 tabs) friend sends me a youtube video to watch (13 tabs)...constantly switching between all tabs to finish what I was doing...

... I have been there. Heck, I'm still there. I could put StinDWg to shame with the number of tabs I have open right now between FF, Chrome and Thunderbird. Every day comes new links to check out but usually there ends up being a few that I haven't gotten around to. And each day, the number grows.

Back in the days when I was a regular daily newspaper reader including two Sunday papers and a tendency to be very thorough, I would have piles upon piles of articles saved for later reading, for general reference or kept for follow-up research. Now, the same habits have followed me over to the computer with my web-surfing. Row upon row upon row of open tabs have replaced the piles of newspapers. And no, I'm not otherwise a candidate for Hoarders.

Part of it is procrastination. Faced with a ton of open tabs, I put off trying to work my way through the backlog but yet, I'm still unwilling to simply close them out or even bookmark them. I know that if I bookmark them, I am even more unlikely to ever revisit those pages again.

... I have been there. Heck, I'm still there. I could put StinDWg to shame with the number of tabs I have open right now between FF, Chrome and Thunderbird. Every day comes new links to check out but usually there ends up being a few that I haven't gotten around to. And each day, the number grows.

Back in the days when I was a regular daily newspaper reader including two Sunday papers and a tendency to be very thorough, I would have piles upon piles of articles saved for later reading, for general reference or kept for follow-up research. Now, the same habits have followed me over to the computer with my web-surfing. Row upon row upon row of open tabs have replaced the piles of newspapers. And no, I'm not otherwise a candidate for Hoarders.

Part of it is procrastination. Faced with a ton of open tabs, I put off trying to work my way through the backlog but yet, I'm still unwilling to simply close them out or even bookmark them. I know that if I bookmark them, I am even more unlikely to ever revisit those pages again.

cruelinventions & allbaugh_04, you two are way too OCD. I have at the most maybe five tabs open for just an instance, otherwise it is just one tab all of the time. Even at work, I only need one tab open on my browser, which is *cough IE8..

There is no need to have every site or every bookmark open in the browser. If there is anything I want to check out, I will either save it as a bookmark on my desktop to check out later, or email myself if I find something that I need to go back to later on.

There is no need to have every site or every bookmark open in the browser. If there is anything I want to check out, I will either save it as a bookmark on my desktop to check out later, or email myself if I find something that I need to go back to later on.

Yeah, really. If you haven't read it within 24 hours...you probably don't really want to read it anyway.

Well, many are tabs which contain things I think I should be investigating further because it will be potentially useful or good for me to know. But yes, strictly from an interest standpoint, I'm probably not all that interested in many, so I keep putting them off.

Well, many are tabs which contain things I think I should be investigating further because it will be potentially useful or good for me to know. But yes, strictly from an interest standpoint, I'm probably not all that interested in many, so I keep putting them off.

Then either send it as a email to yourself, or save it as a bookmark. I really do not see a need to have that many tabs open all at once, unless you are benchmarking, or beta testing a new browser build.

Really, no wonder why people have so many memory leaks, and blame it on the Operating System, not the third party software.

Probably because less than 0.0001% of the world uses a browser like you do and thus google chrome developers aren't going to optimize its use in that manner.

And yet Firefox has no problem keeping ram in check with a large number of tabs, neither does Opera. Don't tell me it's because Chrome uses separate processes per tab. No website needs 500-1000MB to run.

Holy Moly! Look at all those tabs! And extensions too. Is this thread a joke?

The point was Chrome uses 5-10x the amount of ram Firefox does. I use the same 5-10 extensions on Chrome and Firefox. The only joke is Chromes inability to free memory when needed. I don't really care if Chrome uses 3GB for 1 tab, as long as it releases memory and cache when the system needs it. Which it doesn't. It just keeps the cache growing bigger and bigger until you have the restart the browser to gain all the memory back. I like Chrome, I still use it as my default browser. I just don't like how Firefox is making major strides with the Memshrink Project and Chrome is basically just getting more inefficient at every new version number.